Texas woman Susan Schorn here--I'm a black belt and self defense advocate living in Austin, and I write about women and fighting for McSweeney's Internet Tendency. Book here, Web site here, video of me beating up my husband behind a dumpster here. Many thanks to His Supreme Rudeness for letting me indulge my penchant for extended livestock analogies on his blog today. Solidarity, ya'll.
There's a reason the average Texas woman is meaner
than a goddamn snake: She lives with Texas men.
Texas women live among men who believe they have a divine
right to control other people. Men who are so sure of this privilege that
they've never wasted a moment reflecting on the corresponding responsibilities
it might entail, nor bothered to employ any sort of nuance as they go about exercising
it.
The quintessentially awful Texas man is rarer than he
used to be, praise Jesus, but he still owns the state government. Here in
Texas, we women have our laws made for us by men like David Dewhurst, who
blamed an "unruly mob" of females for derailing his first effort to ram through a draconian
anti-abortion law, and then huffed on Twitter, "be assured that I'll strictly enforce rules to uphold decorum, ensuring
our democratic process isn't interrupted." Men like Rick Perry, who
lectured Wendy Davis on how she ought to have learned from her own life experiences, because
clearly a Harvard lawyer needs remedial instruction from a man who barely scraped a C in his college course on Reproduction in Farm Animals. And men like Jonathan Strickland, who Tweeted his gratitude for the Second Amendment when faced with all the scary gals waving coat hangers. In Texas, women like me live
with men who have never doubted their right to rule us, school us, or shoot
us.
Frankly I'm a little surprised that Perry didn't earn
a better grade in his study of the forced breeding of cattle, because he and
his fellow Texas womb police show an innate understanding of the concept. A conservative
male Texas legislator, contemplating the problem of female sexuality, basically
sees himself as a bull--not a tough, range-savvy Longhorn, but a pampered,
cosseted beef industry breeding machine, with all the female fecundity of his
species as his lawful due. He feels entitled to respectful handling,
ready access to his herd, and docile receptacles for his valuable seed, which
it is his right and duty to propagate.
The fate of those adorable knock-kneed calves after
they're born doesn't concern him; that a sizable percentage of "his"
cows are lost to the rigors of calving each year is not his problem. All he's
concerned with is leaving the imprint of his own turgid balls on as much of the
future as he possibly can. And that requires an orderly breeding operation.
Which explains Dewhurst and his peers' ruttish outrage
at being interrupted in the midst of their sweaty, red-faced lawmaking. Davis's filibuster thwarted them in mid-thrust, and provided a climax very
different from what they were anticipating. And thus the bellowing commenced--and
the arrests, and the nonsensical, yet oddly telling, confiscation of feminine hygiene products (did you know that in a commercial beef breeding operation,
all the cows are kept on the same estrus cycle? They call that "quality
control.").
Watch the video of the DPS trooper handcuffing a 74-year-old women, and you'll be surprised that he doesn't throw his hands up in the air when he's
finished, like a contestant at a calf-roping. Because when you live with these
big ugly lumps of beef, you know that the last thing they can tolerate is chaos
in the breeding barn. Animals that don't cooperate have to be roped and
wrangled into submission. The cows cannot be allowed to decide whether or when
they want to be serviced.
Rational people might call this approach to
reproductive rights rape culture. I certainly do. Living with it--and with the people who perpetrate it, and normalize
it, and make sanctimonious speeches about it--does not incline me to sweetness
and light.
Some women, in Texas and elsewhere, are patient and docile, and amble
willingly into the breeding chute. They moo about the sanctity of life, even
when it's engendered by force. A few prize heifers actually help the bulls run their breeding operation,
like Jodi Laubenberg, whose sponsorship of the recently-passed legislation recalls the moment in Animal Farm when the pigs stand up and
start walking on their hind legs. (Laubenberg is the same gold-plated brainbox
who claimed that “In the emergency room they have what’s called rape kits
where a woman can get cleaned out.")
But most of us Texas women are not docile, and we've run out of patience. We're sick of being
regarded as incubators, tired of being told we're less important than a
non-viable fetus. So you can expect to hear a lot more whooping and hollering
from Texas in the coming days, as we round up this bunch of worn-out old bulls,
and send them to the packing plant.
And then, we will have one hell of a barbecue.
